How Bloggers Make Money from Blogs

My Personal Income Streams

As an update to this post I’ve more recently written one on How I make Money Blogging which highlights the most profitable ways that I use blogs to generate income. I’ve also written extensively on how bloggers make money in ProBlogger the Book.

How do bloggers make money from blogs?

I’ve been reflecting this week about the amazing diversity of opportunities that are opening up for bloggers to make money from blogging.

I’ve long advised that bloggers seeking to make money from blogging spread their interests across multiple revenue streams so as not to put all their eggs in one basket.

The wonderful thing is that this is becoming easier and easier to do 2005 has seen many options opening up. I thought I’d take a look at some of the methods that bloggers are currently using to make money through blogs.

Income Streams for Bloggers – How to Make Money Blogging

Advertising Programs – Perhaps the most obvious changes in the past few months have been with the addition of a variety of viable advertising options for bloggers looking to make money from their blogs. The most common way bloggers seem to earn money online is via the contextual ad program from Google – Adsense. A more recent addition that many are using successfully are Chitika.

RSS Advertising – The past 12 months have seen some advances in RSS Advertising also. I’m yet to hear of any bloggers making big money blogging through it to this point – but as improvements are made to the ad programs exploring this I’m sure we’ll start to see examples of it being profitable.

Sponsorship – In addition to the array of advertising programs that are available to join there is a growing awareness in the business of the value and opportunity that exists for them to advertise directly on blogs. I’m hearing more and more examples of this and have been fortunately to have a couple of ad campaigns of my own in the past month – one with Adobe a couple of weeks ago and another just completed with Ricoh for a new digicam over at my Digital Camera Blog. These are not isolated cases – as I say I know of many blogs exploring sponsorship with advertisers at present and suspect we’ll see more of it in the year ahead. Sponsorship is also happening on a post by post basis with some bloggers being paid to write on certain topics by companies – either in one off or a regular fashion – and they are able to make big money from their blogs doing so.

Digital Assets – Increasing numbers of bloggers have been developing other digital assets to support and add revenue streams to their blogs. By this I mean that I’m increasingly seeing e-books, courses and tele-seminars being run by bloggers. This type of activity will only increase in future – in fact this week I’ve seen numerous examples of bloggers running courses.

Blog Network Opportunities – with the rise in popularity of Blog Networks – bloggers are also being presented with more places to earn an income from their blogging – by writing for and with others. While it might be difficult to get a writing gig with one of the bigger networks – there are plenty who are always asking for new bloggers to join and who are willing to pay bloggers using a variety of payment models. While there are distinct advantages of blogging for yourself – blogging for an established network who will handle a lot of the set up/promotion/admin/SEO etc has it’s advantages also. More and more bloggers are combining writing for themselves on their own blogs with taking on blog network blogs as additional income streams.

Business Blog Writing Opportunities – as blogging has risen in it’s profile as a medium more and more businesses are starting blogs. Many of these companies have internal staff take on blogging duties – but an increasing number of them are hiring specialist bloggers to come on and run their blogs. I know of a number of bloggers who in the past month or two have been approached for such paid work. Check out the ProBlogger Job Board if you’re looking for this type of work.

Non Blogging Writing Opportunities – Also becoming more common are bloggers being hired to write in non blogging mediums. Manolo’s recent coup of a column in the Washington Post is just one example of this as bloggers are increasingly being approached to write for newspapers, magazines and other non blog websites. Along side this is the rise of bloggers as published book authors – this is to the extent that one blogger I spoke with this week complained to me that they were one of the few bloggers than they knew who didn’t have a book deal!

Donations – Tip Jars and donation buttons have been a part of blogging for years now but this last year saw a number of bloggers go full time after fund raising drives. Perhaps the most high profile of these was Jason Kottke of kottke.org who through the generosity of his readership was able to quit his job and become a full time blogger.

Flipping Blogs – Also more common in 2005 was the practice of ‘Blog Flipping’ – or selling of blogs. This has happened both on an individual blog level (I can think of about 20 blogs that sold this year) but also on a network level (the most obvious of these being the 8 figure sale of Weblogs Inc to AOL).

Merchandising – My recent attempt to sell ProBlogger.net T-shirts wasn’t a raging success, but it is an example of how an increasing number of bloggers are attempting to make a few extra dollars from their blogs by selling branded products through programs like Cafepress. While I didn’t have a lot of success with merchandising – quite a few larger blogs are seeing significant sales – especially blogs with a cult following. I’m not at liberty to discuss details – but I know of one largish blog which will see sales over $20,000 in merchandise for the calendar year of 2005.

Consulting and Speaking – While it has been popular for established consultants to add blogs to their businesses we’re also starting to see bloggers with no consulting background able to make money by charging readers for their time in consulting scenarios BECAUSE of the profile that their blogs have built them. Blogging has the ability to establish people as experts on niche topics and we all know the value of being perceived as an expert. I spoke to one blogger last month who charges himself out at over $200 an hour for speaking and consulting work – his area of expertise was something that he knew little about 18 months ago – but through his blog he’s become a leader in his field and a minor celebrity in his industry.

As time rolls on there are more and more ways that bloggers make money from their blogs opening up. Feel free to suggest your own ideas and experiences in comments below.

Update: Looking for more information on how to make money blogging? Here’s a post I wrote talking about my own experience – particularly looking at the top ways that I make money from blogs.

Also check out these resources on how to set up a profitable blog:

ProBlogger the Book – where I and Chris Garrett sum up all of the basic tips about starting up a blog in the one volume.

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Marketing Gurus like you have successfully taught the basics required for blogging. Whether it is to drive traffic to his site or make money, blogging has become mandatory for every website owner or an internet enthusiast. With recession hit economy people go crazy nowadays searching over the web the possible ways to earn money online. Blogging can prove worth enough for them.

Hmm interesting…but it does take a lot of effort and time in building your blog before you really see the money. I have a blog on real estate investment (click my name) but I don’t see any hard cash yet as till now.

I make some money from Adsense by blogging. The real problem that most bloggers face is how to increase traffic. It seems that promoting the blog with Adwords is more effective than just relying on search engine robot to crawl our web or blog.

Yeah I had the same experience with adsense. It would function but it would also distract and compete. There are filters that let you screen out certain content but even with those you’re never 100% safe.

hey great news man. Thanks for sharing. but as far as i tried it takes pretty long time to get good returns. One must have really patience to earn a lot. Recently I tried out a site called smartappsportal.com , which is really good. Just little effort and time and you will get good returns. The customer support provided by company is really good. Anyways nice piece of info by you buddy. Keep posting,

Yeh….these are good opportunities but i’ve tried thos …didnt get much money…recently i underwent GDI which is fairly good but now for about 2 months i’m in smartappsportal.com and earning residual income…

I don’t earn from blogs as I don’t run one, but I try to earn with adsense through some of my websites. In my country, if you have a website which is often updated, you have to be given permission from court! Can you imagine? But many people disobey this rule and never go to court… with their websites…

I am getting a few dollars return a day on a blog that I started recently. Every now and then someone will apply to an affiliate link and I’ll get a pay per action commission that’s a nice figure in comparison to Adsense.

I have created a blog under eface.in namely http://www.technology.eface.in and now my earnings is greater than my monthly salary. If once post is powerful and very useful to others, views will stay more time. Thats i studied.
Regards,

Thanks for the post. I just started writing blogs which i thought was very hard to do until I read your article. I found it very helpful indeed. I’ve also written me a couple of blogs I hope people will find helpful. Check them out and comment.

thanks for the info. Might as well go and try Adsense. If we really are determined , we must try to see persevere to earn money. Not just from blogs but also in the real world. Global crisis has always been a problem, and if we try to always depend on money from blogs, what would happen then? What if the time comes that all of these things are gone? So we really need to persevere more. Cheers for the post!

Do I first look to increase my readership and profile… then go for advertising or vice versa…
And many of the ad networks reject you until you have a certain level of readership… confused I will be.
I keep on working on readership then on the money??

A very old post, and still comforting. I started to dive into online biz around 2003, and got traumatic experiences back then, losing couples of important bucks in my life for nothing. I stopped doing the biz since then, and made myself buried in the office up to last month. Now I am back. Hope all the lessons taught me well. Now “…Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for You are with me…” Thanks for clear water.

I haven’t visited problogger for quite a long time. I don’t know how I missed this article. I just want to thanks for sharing these information on earning through our blogs. There were so many of the things the bloggers wouldn’t know when it comes to earning via their blogs. I believe Darren has written almost everything about earning via blogs.

To quote you: I’ve long advised that bloggers seeking to make money from blogging spread their interests across multiple revenue streams so as not to put all their eggs in one basket.

You have provided so many places for a blogger to start with. But this can be confusing for some. Let’s not forget the only real enemy here is not being focused. This could happen to some so my advice is: Stay focused!

Btw I started with all my eggs in one basket and I am now exploring alternatives. Did this bring more money? Sure it did. Happy blogging ;)

I’m blogging for almost 2 years now, and what I knew is that I could only earn from blogging is through writing stuffs for advertisers, and posting some adverts. But when i read your post about making money, i was really amazed that there are lots of ways to earn more money. Well maybe, before monetizing a blog, a blogger must always have to build his network. Anyways, your site is very informational. I keep on reading your posts, because I know that I could be a very good blogger if I would continue learning, and reading some tips from pros like you. Hope you could drop on my blog sometime. Thanks

I’ve just started a blog, and I think this article is great advice to whoever wants to make money online. The only problem is that I need more traffic on my site. Maybe that will improve as I add more content to my blog.